The Orpheu generation and the Avant-Garde: intersecting literature and the visual arts

Abstract

Considering the literary and artistic production of key figures from the Orpheu generation, this essay examines their transnational links to counterparts in the European avant-garde through acquaintance and epistolary networks. More specifically, it does so by focusing on the intersections between literature and the visual arts in works by writers and artists and the periodicals in which they published between 1915 and 1917, to argue that their aesthetic hybridity reflects the experimentalism in the arts of this period animated by the goal of creating "the total work of art", which is central to European modernism and actively practiced by the Portuguese modernists.

Keywords

• Orpheu
• Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
• Cubism
• Futurism
• Cubismo
• Futurismo
• Orfismo